Monthly Archives: February 2011

Tamara Drewe

I just went to the movies by myself for the first time in ages. When we lived in Glasgow I had membership to the big cinema there, which meant free movies all the time. Sometimes multiple times per day, and always multiple times per week.

I love that feeling of sitting on your own in the vast, anonymous theatre. You breathe out, you leave the chatter in your head to itself, and for the length of a film you are suspended. It’s my kind of meditation.

All I’m saying is, it was a nice treat. Great choice, too! I really loved this film.

It’s based on a graphic novel, apparently, which would be interesting to have a look at. It’s about a writers retreat in the arse end of nowhere. A gorgeous, thoughtful woman runs it, her smug prick (asshole/wanker/fuck) of a husband churns out crime novels (a girl once begged me never to use the term “churn out” in regards to my own writing, because it just perpetuates the stigma of genre fiction. I agree, except in this case it definitely applies. The film does have a bit of a go at genre fiction, but academia doesn’t escape unscathed either) and philanders on the side. Enter Tamara Drewe who’s had a nose job and returned to town. Throw in a rockstar boyfriend and some really, really bored teens, and sit back and enjoy the show.

It’s very British. Dry, unsentimental and with a walloping, dark sting in its tail. I think writers particularly will get a kick out of the writerly stuff, because it’s all so devastatingly true. Particularly the first scene made me laugh out loud and inhale my kitkat.

Also, two hours devoted to Gemma Arterton’s beauty is just fine, in my book.

melodrama queen

I’ve been reading ahead in my first draft, to see what’s coming for me in my rewrites. And Lord, it isn’t good.

By the third time in one scene that my heroine blushed, I wanted to rip her out of the draft with my bare hands. My hero too, poncing around saying “Oh woe is me, just because I am beautiful and a duke, I am still a man who bleeds as other men do”.

The number of secondary characters + secondary character plot twists boggles the mind. And makes for sustained melodrama, as everything comes to a head all at once, over chapters and chapters and chapters.

Now, I don’t think it’s at all useful to slam old-me and what old-me wrote, because that’s all a natural part of learning how to actually write – i.e. really not being able to write. It’s kinda great, actually, to see how far a lot of hard work can bring you.

It’s also great being in a headspace that really understands the concept of “kill your darlings”. I’m not just looking at pretty passages here, I’m looking at whole characters and plot points and thinking “if I took you out, would it matter?”

So much of this highly productive headspace has come from listening to Popcorn Dialogues, which is like a masterclass in writing. Jenny Crusie and Lucy March watch a movie a week, then podcast their thoughts and their critical breakdown of it. So far it’s been romantic comedies, but they’re just about to move into Hitmen In Love.

I owe them this great critical phrase:

history and language

As you know, I’ve been workshopping my first chapter in class. There’s been quite a lot of debate over whether it’s appropriate for my characters to say fuck or not (given that it’s set in the Regency – England in the early 1800s).

My reasoning is this:

The first, most important thing to me, is that people living “back then” would have felt just as modern as we do – they were living into a future that was moving beyond them, in a world that progressed without cease. They were human beings whose self-expression defined them (to the extent that men would weep in parliament just to make a point, people).

I cannot possibly reconstruct what natural conversation sounded like back then – as it moved unrehearsed between people.

If I try to sound “ye olde”, or use the kind of language that seems of the time, all it will convey to modern audiences is a stiff self-consciousness in the characters that they are of a bygone era.

So what I do is use language more flexibly, so that the characters feel modern and expressed to a modern audience. This feeling is more important to me – and seems to express more truly the actual nature of the characters – than trying to be strictly correct when I will never be able to be word-perfect anyway.

Here’s where I need to mention that writers I admire manage to do both, i.e. use historically-accurate/appropriate vernacular and also create a right-now sense of character.

One is the inimitable Dorothy Dunnett, of course, that master of historical fiction. The device she uses most often to make her characters of their time, is to have them quoting obscure literary works. This evokes the world vividly, and the character as a thinking being interacting with the world. It also makes a character look highly intelligent, if they can use snippets out of context to convey their own meaning, with subtext woven out of a whole literary tradition.

Unfortunately, this method takes more research and knowledge than I will ever have patience for in my lifetime.

The other writer who I think does admirably is Catherine Jinks. Her Pagan series, set in the Middle East and Europe at the turn of the 12th century, is amazing for so many reasons. However, I will restrain myself and just talk about this particular aspect.

She uses a modern, expressive, punchy structure, but though her character’s voice sounds vibrant and loose, the word-choices are all period-appropriate. Pagan’s favourite curse is “Christ in a cream cheese sauce”. (Er, so I guess I don’t mean period-appropriate in that it was necessarily actually used, but that all the references/words/images are of their time.)

Both these methods are to be studied and aspired to.

Still, there’s one more angle to consider. The word fuck can be seen in writing from as early as the 16th century, but was considered unfit for print for hundreds of years. It has a history of being an expressive and naughty word.

So often when people say “that doesn’t seem historically accurate”, what they mean is,  ”that’s not how they speak in BBC costume dramas”.

happy happy happy

I have been talking a bit about my new novel teacher – the strange creature who understands my genre. After tonight’s class she deserves yet another mention.

My teacher is Toni Jordan, a Melbourne-based writer whose first book, Addition, did extremely well here and overseas. Her second book was released last year. We studied Addition last year, and I didn’t love it. But Toni’s “I’m going to turn you all into professional writers” attitude I do love.

So tonight I workshopped again, and she asked me to see her after class. I walked up to her, she put her hands on the desk, looked me squarely in the eye and said, “What’s your plan for this book!?”

She went on to say that it was just right for the genre, “You get that this is really, really good, don’t you?” and just wanted to check that I knew what I had on my hands, and that I had a game plan for it.

I know this doesn’t mean I’m getting published, but the positive reinforcement is bloody brilliant. I’ve fought my way through the learning curve of last year, and I feel like I’m just re-emerging with the dedication and motivation that come from feeling like getting published – actually in real life – is a real possibility.

(If you’re curious about the piece that I was workshopping, it’s the first chapter of my novel, which you can find here.)

Truth

As my last, incredulous post shows, our novel teacher this year actually understands genre writing. This is fab. I had somehow thought that it would bleed into her selections for our reading list, too (that I wouldn’t be stuck trying to apply the techniques Sebald uses in Austerlitz to my romance novel).

Silly me. Studying genre fiction? In a serious writing course? Not even RMIT would go there.

Still, before I had been disabused of my optimism, I approached Peter Temple’s Truth thinking, “Here’s a crime novel! I suspect I have a lot of interesting things to learn from the genre, that’s applicable to my writing! I suspect it will be an engaging, invigorating read!”

Here’s the opening line:

On the Westgate Bridge, behind them a flat in Altona, a dead woman, a girl really, dirty hair, dyed red, pale roots, she was stabbed too many times to count, stomach, chest, back, face.

Before you assume it’s the violence – it’s not. It’s the fact that it took me a good couple of minutes in real time to figure out what the hell it meant. They were on the Westgate Bridge, but somehow Altona was behind them? Behind figuratively? Are they in front of the flat, but mentally on the Westgate Bridge? Has the woman maybe jumped off the Bridge but the Altona flat, her home, is there with them as a non-physical factor?

WTF?

So far, I hate this book. The dialogue makes no sense, the not-dialogue is overly wordy – which my writing is, too, to be fair – but in a “these are just the facts, I draw no conclusions” kind of way. It fells very, very male, if that’s a fair thing to say. (It’s probably not.)

I assume I don’t understand the pace and rhythm of the genre. This is, most likely, what someone would feel like stumbling on a romance novel for the first time, if love wasn’t really their thing.

But honestly, would it be too much to study just one genre novel in the year? Considering the percentage of genre to literary writers in the class is more like 50, that seems more than fair.

“would they really do that, in a romance novel?”

gah!

Last year was chockers with questions like that, for me. Most of my workshopping time had to be used defending or explaining paragraph lengths, word choice, POV, character traits…

I did my first workshop of the year, the other day, and I still had those kinds of questions. Only this time, my teacher stepped in and answered on my behalf. And then asked the class if they knew who the most successful Melbourne writer was – by miles.

Stephanie Laurens, of course.

Ah! My work has ears that understand its conventions! Still, it also made me realise that hard as last year was, it improved my work immeasurably to be always writing beyond myself.

while the husband sleeps…

it’s one of those magical times – an expanding moment of independence within marriage. He gets the rest he needs, I get the time to follow my solitary pursuits and look at naughty comics online.

I’ve just finished reading Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert. Two things are lingering:

1. She and her finace had performed their own private vows to each other, which for them sufficed. I definitely stand on the same side of this line as her friend, who said in frustration, “Marriage is not prayer”.

To her, their private vows sufficed, and it was coming to terms with what society demanded that she found so hard.

To me, her very reluctance to get married makes it clear that speaking your own vows to each other and speaking them legally, with witnesses, are very different things. They had already vowed fidelity to each other, to love each other always, to be kind and true. But something about making those vows legal and official absolutely terrified her.

(I don’t blame her. It is terrifying.)

It’s different for everyone, of course, but I know a lot of people who have experienced the same as me – that getting engaged/married (for me it was really the engagement) changes everything. People tell themselves all the time, “We’re practically married anyway, it’ll just be like a big party to celebrate that”.

But having someone with the authority to do so declare your union official is something else altogether. And there’s something about that particular cultural ceremony that allows vows to really happen. That’s what’s so moving about weddings, right? In that moment, they really are going to love each other forever.

2. It was a long time and a lot of panic before she came across the idea that marriage can be subversive – that it’s a cultural reaction to the human insistence on intimacy, in the face of anything.

This is what romance novels say. It’s what people so often miss about them.

don’t meet your heroes

One very hot evening in 2007, special k and I went to a free concert on the banks of the Hudson River, just up from Ground Zero.

We saw some people play who were not too shabby, and then Martha Wainwright played a solo set, just she and her guitar. It was magical.

Then I decided to go up to the stage and join the smallish crowd waiting to meet her.

Bad move.

She wasn’t very nice, or communicative – and in her defence, she had just flown direct from a particularly muddy Glastonbury festival. I don’t even care that she wasn’t nice, it really has nothing to do with me.

I just took this from it, as I had three years earlier when i met Sime Nugent: Don’t Meet Your Heroes!!!

I recently had the opportunity to see Terry Pratchett speak. I have read almost every book he’s ever written, and I think he’s absolutely phenomenal; there is so much to learn from reading him, about writing. But this is how I thought it through:

It’s his books I love, not him. I can keep loving them, and getting everything I get, without ever coming into contact with him. Ditto Martha. It’s her music I love, and who she is doesn’t enter into that.

The desire to know everything about these people is insidious though. (Er, yes. See the entire tabloid industry.) As I said yesterday, I’ve fallen in love with Matt Smith’s Doctor Who.

Not to be confused with falling in love with Matt Smith.

Because as soon as I see photos of him, the man, the actor, it diminishes who he is on screen. It adds another layer to it, that has nothing to do with it. He isn’t written, in real life.

So next time you feel that need to know more, which is so easily fed by google and the like, just pause for a moment to consider what you really love.

doctor fever

I have officially caught it: I love Doctor Who. Or rather, I love Matt Smith’s Doctor Who.

He’s an odd hero. The only superpower he seems to possess is his brain – and the centuries of info that have gone into it. Oh, and he has a sonic screwdriver. (I can’t decide whether this is brilliant or silly. It’s a small instrument that seemingly does everything.)

That’s what makes him, though, I think. He talks and thinks his way out of everything and anything. He lives with a kind of infectious enthusiasm.

As Rory says to him, “You make people a danger to themselves.” It’s his volatility and his brilliance that make him a dangerous person to be around, more so than the time-travelling thing.

There’s a big win for character, if ever I saw it.